Donna
Siegel

The Internet: Your Best Source For The Latest Customer Information

Today's business customers are looking for vendors who act as partners, who take the time to fully understand their world. Fortunately, the Internet has made it easier than ever to learn what you need about your business prospects: their products, their markets, their values, their issues. The Internet: Your Best Source For The Latest Customer Information.

All of this makes the job of selling tougher. And that means salespeople have to be more imaginative in finding resources that can help set them apart.

At the same time, there is a growing effort by companies to capture more and more information about their customers and to use this information in their sales and service areas. While this type of database gathering and massaging is costly and time consuming, you're out there right now and you're looking for your sales advantage.

The resource is right there under your nose, waiting for you to use it. If you are selling to businesses, whether nationally or locally, before you pick up that phone or walk into a prospect's site, take a look at the information available on the Internet.

The Internet Makes Prospecting Easier

The Internet makes it easy to get information about every single company you may want to call on. Whether the company is large or small, public or private, it's most likely to have some sort of Web site. And with easy access through a search engine, within about five minutes you can be looking through the prospect's information and formulating your own sure-to-win selling strategy.

The Web is a wonderful resource because it's the one place where companies tell you how they view the world. It's the face they want to put in front of their customers and prospects. It's driven by the need to provide customers and prospects with information. But even more so, it's driven by ego. How does this company want to be thought of?

Interpreting The Web Information

Companies can put words and images together in many arrangements. How they organize this information is meaningful. Here are some of the elements that might appear on the Web site and what they mean to you if you're trying to sell to that company.

Product and service descriptions
All companies, of course, want you to know about their products and services. That's the very foundation of the company; the reason they are in business. But how they display their product and service information says much about how they view themselves. Typically, a company home page has one of four focuses:

• Information about products and services
• Brief descriptions of products with links that lead to more information
• Pretty pictures of products with links to their descriptions
• A link to a page that talks about the most prominent product only

If you look at a prospect's Web site and you see that a large amount of space on that first page is devoted to that company's products and services, you know you're looking at a product-driven company. That means if you're going to effectively call on someone in that company, you better go in with an interest in finding out more about their products and services.

In other Web sites, you'll see that the information is differentiated by applications of products and services. This is how the products are used in the banking industry; this is how the same products are used in the retail industry. From the application descriptions, you'll find links to company products and services. An application-oriented Web site suggests the company sees itself as solving problems for its customers. An effective first conversation with this type of prospect probably begins with the subject of its customers: Who are their customers? What kinds of problems do they have that this company solves? What kinds of results do customers achieve by using the company's products?

Contacts
Another important piece of information companies give you on their Web sites are the names of contacts. Many Web sites list the company's executives and their areas of responsibility. Some even give you pictures of key players in the company's decision-making process. From the Web site, it's easy to figure out whom you should be calling on.

Mission statement or goals statement
If a company's Web site announces its mission statement or goals statement, this is another important piece of information to understand about a potential prospect. If you want to know what drives a company's development, it's this one major statement. Sometimes this information is on a separate Web page called "Mission Statement." Many times, this information appears on the "About" page.

Sample mission statements include:

Recruiting and placing top salespeople have been our only business.

This one is from a company that tells you it values focus and quality.

We offer you the largest assortment of . . . all at 25% off.

This kind of statement tells you the company values having a wide range of products and a price sensitivity. If it thinks its customers want a variety of options and a low price, isn't it going to want the same things from you?

Look around our site and contact us when you find what you're looking for. But if you don't find it, simply contact us and we'll find it for you.

Here the company is expressing a customer service orientation to its customers. Don't you think it's going to want the same thing from you?

Style of language
Another important clue to help you plan your sales strategy is how potential prospects use language on the Web site. Do they seem formal? Is the copy breezy and easy to read? Is the information well organized and easy to follow? Is the information overly technical and hard to read if you don't fully understand the company's business?

When it comes to language style, the Web site tells you how the people whom you'll be calling on are likely to talk to each other. Doesn't that tell you something about how they might want you to talk with them?

Non-company information
Another factor to examine is the appearance of non-company information on the Web site. Some companies invest time and space to provide helpful hints, links to other sites, lists of resources, etc. Sites that have these types of non-company information are identifying that they value being a total solution to their prospects and customers. And they'll value the same helpful single source of assistance from you when you make your initial contact with them.

Alignment Is The Key

The goal throughout the selling process is to bring yourself into alignment with your prospects, to demonstrate that you share the same values and vision of the world. Prospects are most likely to want to buy from people who they sense are like themselves. Thus, the more you understand the view of the world from the prospect, the more likely you are to sell your products and services.

When you're selling to a company, the Internet has made it easier for you to align your sales strategy with the prospect's value system. After all, you just have to spend a few minutes looking at the company's Web site to figure out what's important to this company.

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Donna Siegel

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